I remember one of my daughters who I was talking to about her mother’s family, my family and I had helped affect her outcome in the future, and I was proud to have helped her. She was very proud of herself and to my complete surprise and I wasn’t expecting this at all, she said that I hadn’t helped her at all.
Surprised, I asked what did she mean. She said that she was so intelligent no matter what I’d done to help her in her life she still would have turned out a great person.
I was not after any praise, but honest recognition and being thankful is nice.
I mentioned that if she had been brought up in their mother’s family without me, many were druggies and did bad things you know criminals, she would have turned out like her cousins and she said that even though she’d been brought up in their families she wouldn’t have been like the other children were, because they had followed the family footsteps, she would still have turned out a well educated, person, brilliant.
She was wrong, but there was nothing I could say to tell her she was wrong so I didn’t try.
On another occasion, when she went to high school at 15 years old, she had from the age of 9 to 14 being homeschooled. At the end of that one year she received certificates, trophies, and awards. The school said we should have sent her to the school earlier because she a great mind.
I was a bit sad they didn’t notice that from 9 to 14 I had been her teacher, so you would have thought they would have given me some of the credit but they didn’t.
At home when I congratulated her and said I was very happy she got the awards and everything and that I’d failed school, as I’ve mentioned before she said some bad things about me being unintelligent and her being obviously more intelligent than I, and basically I had no affect on her well educated mind.
She had no comprehension of my help in her life at all. I remember when we watched, I think it was the movie the yearling, and I said to her while she was about nine years old, I want you to be a better person than I am, and to my surprise she looked at me like I was stupid and said, “of course I will.” Something like that.
People sometimes don’t experience help as help when that help is regular, on a day to day basis. They experience it as simply how life is. Like the air we breathe, it only gets noticed when it’s missing. They appreciate the help, they appreciate the changes within themselves, but pride puts all the credit on themselves for “being smart enough to change’, even though for many people it takes God chastizing them, or something else happening that shocked them in to change, not their own decision but something that put them under pressure to change, listen, learn, than something that they just decided to do.
Often when someone has built a successful life, they attach a lot of their identity to having done it themselves. Acknowledging that someone helped can feel, to them, like it diminishes their achievement, even though it doesn’t. Sometimes it’s also just that children don’t see what was done for them. Early support, like the hours of teaching and encouragement, becomes “just life”, kind of invisible, because it was always there.
What stands out in memory is the visible struggle, the efforts, the struggles day by day that he or she went through in that changing of character and life, and they know deep inside that he or she really did work hard, really did listen, and obviously have changed, and with positive (possibly dishonest) encouragement from others, they put all the credit on the other people or on themselves, refusing to see where the real effort came from.
If God helps you, and you don’t give full credit to God, in the future your pride will lie to you, and you will tell yourself how special you were for changing, and take all the credit away from God and the person who God used to help you, and in doing that you are using “pride” (which is of Satan) to lie to yourself, and you are refusing to give God and God’s helper any credit for helping you, and since pride is more important to you than recognising who really should get the credit, Satan can use your foolish pride to control you again in the near future, to become his once again, to do his will.
And eventually to reap the rewards of being Satan’s once again.
You note that Jesus said, How can people say he is doing evil when he is doing God’s work, always doing good.
He was trying to explain the good things he was doing. The people who were listening to Jesus were changing, their characters were changing, ever becoming different people, had still not got it in their heads that if it were not for Jesus they would have been really bad people. As long as they did not recognise that Jesus was the one who changed their lives for the better, Pride had more control of them than their own hearts and new souls.
Mary would have been one of them, so Jesus sees her first and she’s a prostitute, as time goes by he notes her and the group of people listening to him when he preaches, he explains life as God intended a good wholesome life they should and could have, and he teaches about God’s ways, and how they can become people who loved and respected themselves in the most honest and respectful ways.
As time went by he noticed that Marie was changing, her clothes were changing her manners were changing, her mannerisms, she was smiling more, wore less make up, she became kind to other people, lost the foul language, lost the arrogance and high-and mighty attitude, she became kind to the children and cared about them, and she saw this change as natural growth.
What Jesus had done, was become Mary’s parents, because Mary’s parents had failed her, and unknown to Mary her listening to Jesus, following Jesus, being his student at a distance she had become like his child, and he was teaching her how to go from being a feminist and whore to becoming a loving decent person.
Her parents. They would not have wanted her to recognise Jesus as working good in her life, so they would have been sure to make sure that Mary didn’t realise who had changed her life.
So Mary was probably saying bad things about the do-gooder Jesus, and making herself look more and more decent, but her pride would have grown with her personal character improvments, and with that pride a feeling of self achievement, she had done well, a positive attitude about herself, she was becoming a new person because she was a wonderful person, because she was changing because she wanted to change.
The words of Jesus going into Mary’s head, and Mary’s friends heads, over a long period of time, were affecting Mary, in a way that a parent affects a child, but Mary didn’t see Jesus as her father, he was just this man who was preaching the good news so to her she was listening, learning and subconsciously her entire character was changing for the better. Her desire to be a prostitute had gone, her desire to do the filthy things a prostitute does was gone, and all the things her mother and father saw no wrong in were gone.
Jesus was trying to tell Mary and others, that he has helped them because he was a good soul, that the reason he’d help them was because as he was doing good, but because of the character assassination he’d been put into peoples minds, the church, the criminals, through those who hated him, as a terrible person – people were saying bad things about Jesus all the time constantly, so that no one would like him.
Mary and others were taking the help that Jesus was giving them that was completely changing their lives and make them a lot happier, a lot healthier, better people, but because they were getting a constant feed of he’s a bad man, they were struggling to see the real honest loving effect that God and Jesus had on their lives.
Because they were taking from Jesus, still calling Jesus a bad person, blame shifting and making Jesus a scapegoat for the wrongs they done, it wasn’t the cross that was killing Jesus, it was the very people Jesus had helped, especially the young people. When Jesus got angry at them, like Moses, like Noah, Jesus was defending himself against the lies, and trying to explain to them, that he was not there to hurt anyone.
Jesus not trying to take advantage of them, he was not asking them to come and help him, he wanted them to stop being mean to him, because as long as they were being cruel to him people hated him and were tormenting him, hurting him, he wasn’t getting the opportunities they were getting, he was suffering, he was cold, he had nothing, no way to travel and he was alone. No-one wanted to help Jesus.
Jesus was doing good for people, Jesus was doing God’s work in the hearts of the very people God wanted Jesus to help, but they refused to recognise Jesus was helping them, and like my daughter, they were being prideful and they refuse to see that they would not be the good characters they were at that stage with out the help of Jesus. The parents they were listening to were the ones who had let them down, not Jesus, not God.
My daughter left home at about 18 years old, and she still had no comprehension of my help for her. I think she also judged me by the rest of the house we had, our poverty, because when people are materialistically minded and have a lot of pride that’s how they judge people that way.
So all the years I sat down with her and talked to her, explained right from wrong to her, how to be a good person, how to be a decent person, to avoid drugs alcohol etc, she used the advice in a good way but her pride told her the only reason she changed was because she was a special person, not because I told her anything. She was pridefully looking down on me as a lesser person than she was, but also learning and changing because of me.
I learned with her, that if I try to defend myself, and tell her that she had no one other than me in her life to help her become a respectful person, because all her mother’s family and my family will not very respectful, she refused to believe that it was because of me that any change in her had happened. In her mind all changes were her work, and she didn’t need me, had never needed me, all her life.
This probably came from her mother I don’t know, but what I did learn as you can spend decades, like 18 years, pouring your heart out to a person helping that person, guiding that person, sacrificing for that person, suffering for that person, doing your very best, and they still won’t appreciate you, they still refuse to see your help in their life, and they only see themselves as the reason why they are the person they are.
For many people, achievement is not just something they did but something they are, its a deep feeling of “I did this!”.
Admitting that someone else played a large part can feel like shrinking their own contributions to success. If a person’s sense of worth rests on being capable and self-made, then acknowledging help can feel, even if only subconsciously, like admitting they are less capable than they thought.
This is especially strong in people who value independence, like my daughter.
The more someone prizes standing on their own two feet, the more uncomfortable it becomes to recall the hands that steadied them. Remember, we live in a society that approves heavily self achievement, the winning the goal all on our own sounds much more impressive than that guy Jesus who everyone looks down on actually helepd me. It can feel too embarresing to admit that to a prideful person.
Pride is a liar. Imagine, Jesus is helping Mary, Mary is changing, but Satan uses her family to keep Mary hating Jesus, while she learns from Jesus and Mary’s pride is so high that she refuses to see where the help is coming from. So Jesus could teach Mary that prostitution is bad, and as Mary moves from prostitution she sees pridefully in her own mind that her change and character and lifestyle was solely her own doing, or maybe her parents talked some kind of praise to build up her ego, or they tried to make Mary think that what Jesus was doing for her was actually their doing, or anyone else helping you.
Jesus was frustrated, he was suffering, his health was failing, his life was falling apart, and the very people he gone through all the suffering for were turning away from him, crucifying him.
The thing that’s important here to understand is, if Mary had stayed away from Jesus, in time because her parents were bad people, they would have talked Mary and going back to prostitution and living old life again.
Satan wins when he can get people to back up and do his work, and Mary was an intentionally backing up and supporting Satan, by pretending that she was so special that she could change her life from being a bad person to a good person all by herself and that Jesus’ effort, was merely like reading the book, he was of no consequence, no importance, not special in her life.
But this is where she was to suffer, because once Jesus was gone, dead, she would have been left on her own with her parents who she defended for years wrongfully, and because they are internally bad, not saved from Satan, not born again (because they really didn’t want to be) they would have uncontrollably seduced her again and to becoming what they are, and there would have been no Jesus and no God to help her, or protect her, or to help her friends, and Jesus’ effort would have been short lived.
Psychologists have long noted that we see our own contributions to our own personal life, character changes, and our struggles and journey, much more clearly than other people’s. We know exactly how hard we worked because we were there for every minute of it. We have no equivalent view of what others did on our behalf, much of which happened out of sight. This lopsided view of effort is a major reason people credit themselves more than is accurate.
Consider your life, consider Mary’s life, and consider the poverty and suffering Jesus was going through, and think about how she would have felt as a prideful person about Jesus, what he did for her, and refusing through shame (the shame was partly her own blame by falsely accusing him for many years) and how she secretly wanted Jesus’ help but publicly denounced him.
Jesus had worked with her for years, and we do know that in the end Mary went to Jesus.
But after all the years of Jesus’ help, Mary still was connected to Satan/Evil via her pride, and Satan watched her change gleefully knowing that he still had the key to her mind and that key of control was her pride which up to that point had owned her.
Knowing this, Satan hated Jesus, and what a joy knowing that those who Jesus had helped were slowly killing him, and pridefully like Peter they all denied Jesus, refused to admit that they knew anything of Jesus, for their minds were all still owned in part by Satan.
Until they removed that pride they could not learn any more from Jesus and Jesus would die without them helping him, protecting him, so that they could all do God’s work and defeat Satan.
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